LittleNipper wrote:huckelberry wrote:My you have chosen a hard path there spotlight. How in the world are you or we going to calculate the energy required to erode the grand canyon. I might add that Nippers imaginary lake is as big as it needs to be. It should be calculable how much energy lake Bonneville dropping five thousand feet would release. What percentage of that would be moving rock?
When Lake Bonneville broke releasing large amounts of water it went down the Snake river through Hells canyon. Hells canyon is much closer to a single v shape gulch because of that. The fact that that the grand canyon of the Colorado is widely branched with side canyons proves it was not formed by a sudden lake emptying.
Central Washington state has a much better example of large floods digging big canyons. The one to the North of where I live is ten miles wide and a couple of hundred feet deep. The flood waters continued down the Columbia to the ocean. That channel cuts off side canyons carving a single trough shape due to the large volume of water.
The shape of a canyon fits the process which formed it.
Lets try to be simpler. There is a small stream a couple of blocks from my house. It flows out of the nearby mountains where in it has cut a canyon some two thousand five hundred feet deep through basalt rock. The start of the canyon is a ridge top with a stream flowing in the opposite direction toward the Snake river. There is no room for lakes or big water flows. Instead you have a small stream. To have carved the canyon since Noah time it would have to be cutting some five inches a year. I have known the stream and canyon for fifty years. If that rate was continuing there would be some 20 feet carved away in the stream bed. The real carving is too small to be visible.
Talking about the grand canyon misses the point entirely. The west is full of thousands of canyons whose depth shows erosion taking place over millions of years.
Here is another scientific solution: https://answersingenesis.org/geology/gr ... nyon-form/
I spent a little time going over some of the proposals on this site and wanted to make two posts about it. The first is positive, I would like to reconsider some of my comments about sudden flooding.
The link describes some of the complexity in the grand canyon. It presents several views of the history of the river and uncertainties about how it cuts the high plateau between the east and west end of the canyon.
The article suggests that rapid emptying of large upstream lakes could contribute to the process. I tried second opinions from geological sites and found discussion of that as a possibility.
I am not extensively familiar with the canyon unlike the canyons in my home region. I have visited it a few times. I also have a clear memory of what it looks like flying over it at 26000 ft. From that angle the width of the upper canyon contrasts greatly with the narrow lower canyon. Perhaps that wide upper canyon is related to an event or events with large volumes of water. I am not making a conclusion.
